He would have—well, I don't know what he could have done, exactly. I suppose that even he could scarcely have interfered with the carrying out of the law! Still, I felt that it would have been a great comfort to have had him there in that car.
And, as I am going to be engaged to him, there would have been nothing incorrect in allowing him to hold my hand. In fact, I should have done so. I hadn't got any gloves with me, and the night air was now chill.
"Why, your little hands are as cold as ice, Miss Smith," murmured Mr. James Burke to me as the car stopped at last outside what are called the grim portals of justice. (Plenty of grimness about the portals, anyway!) "You ought to have kept——"
Even at that awful moment he made me wonder if he were really going to say, boldly out before the detective and everybody: "You ought to have kept your hands in mine as I wanted you to!"
But no. He had the grace to conclude smoothly and conventionally: "You ought to have kept the rug up about you!"
Then came "Good-nights"—rather a mockery under the circumstances—and the departure of the two young men, with a great many parting protests from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop about the "prepassterousness" of the whole procedure. Then we arrested "prisoners" were taken down a loathsome stone corridor and handed over to a——
Words fail me, as they failed Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. I can't think of words unpleasant enough to describe the odiousness of that particular wardress into whose charge we were given.
The only excuse for her was that she imagined—why, I don't know, for surely she could have seen that there was nothing of that type about either Miss Million or Miss Smith—she imagined that we were militant Suffragettes!
And she certainly did make herself disagreeable to us.
The one mercy about this was that it braced Miss Million up to abstain from shedding tears—which she seemed inclined to do when we were separated.